Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players is a masterful study of quietude that in the 1960s was embroiled in a dramatic art heist.
“I t cries out with truth and completeness,” said Fernand Legér of The Card Players, Cézanne’s gentle portrayal of two peasants in a rural bar, immersed in a game of cards, distracted only by their individual thoughts and a bottle of vin rouge. Painted in 1894–95, this ambitious achievement of the artist's late period is housed in the 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
It is, in fact, one of five versions of the composition. The others are in the collections of the Barnes Foundation Museum in Philadelphia, 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Courtauld Institute in London and the collection of the Royal Family of Qatar – the last of which was sold privately in 2011 for a reported £250 million, at the t🌌ime the highest price achieved for any painting.
Claude Monet described Cézanne as “a Flaubert of painting” – a reference to his “tenacious, unyielding” approach to realism. It was a judgment endorsed by Legé💝r, who described the Provencal painter as one of the great revolutionaries. “With him, we’re poles apart from decorum. He melds his▨ life in his work, the work in his life.”
The Card Players was subjected to a lack of decorum itself in the summer of 1961, when it was stolen, along with seven other Cézannes, in aꦕ night-time robbery from the Pavillon de Véndome in Aix-en-Provence. They were later returned for a ransom.
The break-in was just one of a number of high-profile art thefts in the south of France in the mid-20th century. The vulnerability of remote chateaus, with masterpieces hanging on their walls, piqued the interest of professio🐲nal criminals from across Europe. Some collectors – including the author William Somerset Maugham – decided to sell their collections rather than wait for a raid.
Works by Cézanne – oils, watercolours, sketches – continue to be highly sought after at Sotheby’s auctions. In the famous Goldschmidt Sale of 1958, Garçon au Gilet Rouge sold for £220,000 – at the time the most expensive Modern work of art. And in 1999, Sotheby’s achieved the current auction record for the artist with the sale of Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier for $60.5 million.
More recently, in our November 2018 Impressionist & Modern Art Evening sale in New York 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Arbres et maisons au bord de l'eau – a geometric landscape of river, ri🎀verbank, trees and country houses – sold for £11🌳.13 million.
The fascination with the artist and his Provencal days has inspired artists from Monet, Picasso and Braque to Hockney. In 2015, photographer Joel Meyerowitz completed a series of still lives of the contents of Cézanne’s atelier in Aix – chairs, bottles, canvases – shot against ateli൲er walls painted dark grey by the artist more than a century ago.
